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36%
Overall Rating
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Ranked #4,023
...out of 20,698 movies
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It's Halloween night, and slacker video clerk Stan Helsing along with his insanely sexy ex-girlfriend , best buddy and an exotic dancer/ 'massage therapist' - detours into a town cursed by the biggest monsters in movie history: Freddy, Jason, Pinhead, Leatherface, Chucky, and Michael Myers.
--IMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: November 11, 2009
I love the parody genre, to the point where I was even able to find a thing or two to enjoy about a few of those Date / Epic / Spartans movies that everyone gripes about. I also love the horror icons, and these two statements do not conflict with one another: I'm not one of those horror snobs who thinks that you shouldn't parody the legends. You want to do something like, let's see, put Freddy Krueger in a Charlie Brown shirt and slap a Flavor Flav necklace on him? As long as it's funny, you have my support. Unfortunately, Stan Helsing is not funny, it's not witty, and I feel ripped off for having rented it from Netflix. Remember, this is coming from someone who found those "cinematic abortions" to be moderately humorous... does that say anything about the quality of this one?
There's something in here that vaguely resembles a plot in the loosest sense of the word, and it follows four friends - Stan Helsing (Steve Howey), his ex-girlfriend Nadine (Diora Baird), the token black guy Teddy (Kenan Thompson), and the slutty Mia (Desi Lydic) - who have to deliver some movies to somebody before attending a Halloween party. Along the way, they encounter man-eating dogs, escaped serial killers, hillbillies, manly-looking waitresses (Leslie Nielsen in a new career low), and yes, the horror legends. The legends here consist of Pleatherface (Twan Holliday), Fweddy (Ben Cotton), Michael Criers (Lee Tichon), Mason (Ken Kirzinger), Needlehead (Charles Zuckermann), and Lucky (Jeff Gulka), and really, that's about it for story. Oh, sure, there's something in here about a town that needs to be saved from those baddies and there's even that thing about Stan being a descendant of Van Helsing, but it's more of an afterthought than anything.
With a film like this, I don't care about strong acting, cohesive storylines, great special effects, or any of the other things that I typically expect from a finer movie. I pick up a movie like this to laugh, and if it also happens to deliver something else alongside said laughs, then I see that as a bonus. Stan Helsing, as I said up above, is not funny. I'm not saying that it's not the comedy release of the year here, I'm saying that in the ninety minutes that it ran for, I laughed once (at a guy punting the Chucky doll across the room) and chuckled maybe twice. Again, I'm going back to the Date Movie comparison here: I enjoyed those movies to a certain extent, but this? This was painful even for me.
If you read those last two paragraphs, you'll see that I made two points: one, the movie has absolutely squat for storyline so it relies on the jokes to keep viewers entertained, and two, the jokes aren't funny. Really, do I need to say anything else? Well, I could point out the atrocious editing job that some amateur pulled on the product as that did irk me more that once. The movie is rated R, there is one set of boobies in it, there's a close-up of a woman's panty-clad crotch, and there are a handful of scenes where the characters fondle Diora Baird's ample bosom. With that in mind, it should go without saying that there wasn't a problem in showing mature content: these filmmakers weren't going for a PG-13 rating and they weren't trying to make a television version of the film. So, why is it that in every other scene, things will cut out right before the F-bomb is dropped, and why do we cut away from jokes before the punchlines are actually delivered? Why are these characters referencing places, people, and events that we never saw? It's almost as though the film was edited by too many different people, with at least one of them being an uptight Puritan. I doubt that firing that guy would have saved the movie, but it damned sure wouldn't have hurt.
Stan Helsing is a lot like Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle in that there's a threadbare plot that consists of a single goal. Harold & Kumar made the idea work by providing us with entertaining characters and hilarious jokes, while Stan Helsing is a guaranteed cure for insomnia. A parody film with all of the horror legends involved should have worked, and in capable hands, it easily could have. This, unfortunately, was nothing more than a steaming pile of shit. 0/10.
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#1:
Crispy
- added November 11, 2009 at 5:47pm
Damn, almost bought this on sight the other day.
I'll still probably see it, but I'll hunt it down
in my library.
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#2:
Ginose
- added November 17, 2009 at 1:45am
That's sad, man.
Anyway, it's good to
see Kenan reprising his infamous SuperDude
roll.
No way in shit I'm ever going to watch
this thing. Ever.
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